NGI Sargasso Networks with the Open Internet Search Ecosystem and other NGI projects at OSSYM24

👋Dear NGI-er

The Open Search Symposium 2024 (OSSYM24), held from 9th to 11th October in Munich, brought together the European Open Web Search community for its sixth edition. NGI Sargasso attended the event to connect with the open search ecosystem and explore synergies with other NGI-funded projects.

Organised by the Open Search Foundation at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, the hybrid conference provided a platform for discussing open internet search, AI, and related topics.

✨The event featured scientific talks, workshops, panels, and informal discussions, bringing together researchers, policy-makers, data centres, legal experts, and society representatives.✨

The symposium opened with a Welcome Session by Helmut Reiser, Deputy Director at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, and Florian Herrmann, State Minister and Head of the Bavarian State Chancellery. Roberto Viola, General Director at DG CONNECT, followed with the Opening Keynote.

The first day’s agenda featured Science Tracks covering crawling and infrastructure, search applications, machine learning for search, and large language models (LLMs). In the afternoon, the Next Generation Internet (NGI) session took place, during which presentations from NGI Search and OpenWebSearch.eu were shared.

On the second and third days, participants attended keynotes by Richard Socher (CEO of You.com), Martin Andree (Researcher and Author), and Nina Leseberg (Head of Communities at Wikimedia Deutschland). The agenda included discussions on ethics, legal aspects, and economic factors of open web search, alongside an Industry Track on “Alternative Search Engines.”

Sara Abu and Laura Argilés from AUSTRALO, representatives of NGI Sargasso, participated in discussions with researchers, policy-makers, and other stakeholders by focusing on learning more about transatlantic cooperation under the Next Generation Internet (NGI) framework.

Two other NGI-funded projects, NGI Search and OpenWebSearch.eu, attended OSSYM24. Sara and Laura met with key figures from these projects, including Megi Sharikadze (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre), Stefan Voigt (Open Search Foundation), and Mirko Presser (Aarhus University). They explored potential collaborations aimed at building a more human-centric and trustworthy internet.

Together, these efforts contribute to shaping a better internet for future generations, focusing on transparency, trust, and cooperation in the open web search ecosystem.